Heir to the Holocaust

"It is so green that it is making me angry."

Yitzhak Rabin's comment was uncharacteristically bitter and probably undiplomatic. On the first stop of the first official visit by an Israeli Premier to West Germany, Rabin walked past neatly tended mass graves at the site of the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp near Hannover, where an estimated 30,000 Jews died during the years of Nazi terror. While his German-born wife Leah, who fled the country as a child, looked on, Rabin recited the Kaddish, the traditional Hebrew prayer for the dead. The Premier also laid a wreath of blue and white carnations --the national colors of Israel--at the foot of a memorial plaque.

Before leaving Tel Aviv, Rabin told newsmen that he was undertaking the West German visit "with mixed feelings as a Jew and as an Israeli." A Sabra who was born in 1922 on a farm near Jerusalem, Rabin nonetheless still counts himself "an heir to the Holocaust." As if to emphasize that point, his next stop after Bergen-Belsen was West Berlin, where he paid a visit to the city's Jewish Community Center. It stands on the site of what was once Berlin's Central Synagogue. All that remains of the original building is a chunk of wall. The rest was destroyed on the notorious "Crystal Night" of Nov. 9, 1938, when storm troopers savagely wrecked Jewish homes, synagogues and plate-glass ("crystal") shop windows. Before the war, 175,000 Jews lived in Berlin, but only 6,000 remain there today (with 27,000 in all of West Germany).

Rabin's aim on his five-day visit was to link this doleful past with a more hopeful future. Yet even that future is unsettled, mainly because the relationship between Tel Aviv and Bonn appears to be changing. No European nation has closer ties with Israel than does the Federal Republic, which long ago established a "special relationship" with the Jewish state. In compensation for the horrors of the Holocaust, the West German government has paid reparations to Jews of more than $20 billion, including $800 million to Israel itself. Recently Bonn took the lead in Common Market deliberations that led to tariff preferential on such Israeli products as oranges, chemicals and electrical products.

These days, however, German diplomats are inclined to describe their ties with Israel not as "a special relationship" but as a more balanced "normal relationship with a special character." The change was undoubtedly speeded by the 1973 oil embargo and consequent fuel shortages in Europe, but it was inevitable as time passed. Younger Germans in particular are loath to shoulder continuing blame for outrages that occurred before they were born.

In one way, however, the special character of the relationship should continue to prove helpful to Israel. Rabin and Chancellor Helmut Schmidt reached no dramatic decisions in their conversations last week. Much of their time together was spent reviewing the Middle East situation, with Schmidt pressing Rabin to accept concessions that would lead to peace. In private conversations, however, West German officials indicated at least obliquely that if another Middle East war occurred and Israel needed European landing rights for planes bringing supplies from the U.S., this would be no problem.

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